Public Backlash Swells Against AI as Violence, Divides and Hacking Risks Mount

The tech overlords racing to remake the world with artificial intelligence are learning a hard truth: much of America wants no part of their experiment. In the span of a few days this month, that resentment turned dangerous. A 20-year-old man hurled a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of OpenAI chief Sam Altman. The attacker left a manifesto calling himself a “butlerian jihadist,” a reference to the anti-machine holy war in the Dune novels, and openly advocated killing AI executives. Three days earlier, someone fired thirteen bullets into the Indianapolis home of Democratic councilman Ron Gibson while his eight-year-old son was inside. A note left behind read simply “No Data Centers.” Gibson had supported building one in his district. No arrests have been made in that shooting.

These are acts of political violence and they deserve condemnation. Yet the public reaction on social media, far from universal horror, revealed something darker: a well of fury toward an industry that seems determined to reshape society regardless of what ordinary citizens think. That fury is not coming from nowhere. A sweeping new Stanford Artificial Intelligence Index released this month shows an astonishing gap between the predictions of AI researchers and the lived expectations of normal Americans. Seventy-three percent of experts believe AI will improve jobs over the long term. Only twenty-three percent of the public agrees. On the economy the numbers are even worse: sixty-nine percent of experts versus twenty-one percent of everyone else. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now expect AI to deliver fewer jobs over the next twenty years, not more.

This is not abstract anxiety. Americans have watched factories close, towns hollow out, and wages stagnate for decades while the same coastal elites who benefited lectured them about “progress.” Now those same elites promise that giving machines the ability to think, write, code, and perhaps one day replace human judgment will somehow create a paradise of leisure. Working people are not buying it. A Gallup survey from March painted the same bleak picture of distrust. The public has seen enough promises from people who never have to live with the consequences.

Even inside the MAGA movement that propelled President Trump back to the White House, a genuine schism has opened. One camp views AI as the ultimate expression of American ingenuity, a tool that could restore manufacturing dominance and deliver strategic superiority over China. The other camp sees something darker. They ask, in language that would have been familiar to earlier generations of conservatives, whether this technology is a blessing or a temptation sent to pull humanity away from God’s natural order. What would Jesus prompt? The question is only half-joking. Religious conservatives increasingly speak of AI in frankly spiritual terms, warning that machines that mimic creativity and reason threaten the unique dignity of the human soul. This divide is real and it is growing. It mirrors broader tensions between those who see technological acceleration as destiny and those who believe some lines should not be crossed.

The rapid advance of the technology itself is only feeding the unease. This month Anthropic, another heavyweight in the AI race, unveiled a model called Mythos that can discover and exploit software vulnerabilities at a level “all but the most skilled humans” can achieve. The Pentagon ran a similar experiment a decade ago. Back then the machine lost to human hackers at DEF CON. That gap has closed with alarming speed. The same systems that could defend power grids, hospitals, and financial networks could just as easily be turned against them by hostile governments or non-state actors. When elites brag that artificial intelligence will soon out-think the best cyber defenders on earth, many Americans hear a different message: we are building tools that could one day be used to control or destroy us.

The pattern is now familiar. A handful of billionaires in Northern California and a cadre of academic enthusiasts insist their creation will liberate humanity. Everyone else is told to stop worrying and learn to code, or perhaps to accept that their jobs and communities are simply obsolete. When people push back, they are smeared as Luddites or conspiracy theorists. If the backlash grows uglier, the same voices will lecture us about “stochastic terrorism” while refusing to examine their own role in creating the conditions for it.

The AI industry’s shock at this resistance reveals how insulated it has become. Altman and his peers have spent years describing their work in messianic terms, promising to cure disease, end scarcity, and usher in a new age. They never seem to grapple with the more immediate reality facing millions of Americans: an economy that already fails to reward hard work, a culture that treats people as data points, and a ruling class that views skepticism as backwardness. The Molotov cocktail and the gunfire are wrong. The skepticism is not. When experts live in one world and the public lives in another, eventually the public makes its anger known. Silicon Valley is discovering that lesson the hard way.